


Some love at his hands

by Lilliburlero



Category: Henry V - Shakespeare
Genre: Anal Sex, Bath Sex, Bisexuality, Class Differences, Cultural Differences, Fluff and Angst, Internalized Homophobia, Jealousy, M/M, Oral Sex, Polyamory, Semi-Public Sex, Sex Work, Sexism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-19
Updated: 2014-08-19
Packaged: 2018-02-13 11:42:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2149485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fluellen and Gower go on the ran-tan in Southwark.  Because Agincourt veterans need cuddles, sexy bathing, and awkward negotiation concerning jealousy, polyamory, sexual dominance, Dante, class, and the maddening non-specificity of penitential literature.</p><p>Content note: in addition to the tags, character expressing: murderous and suicidal ideation, guilt about sex and sexuality, heteronormative ideas about sex and sexuality.</p><p>I promise faithfully this fic is actually fluff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some love at his hands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [medeia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/medeia/gifts).



> Any resemblance to actual historical accuracy, early 15th or late 16th century, is purely coincidental.

Apart from his campaign service, Tom Gower has lived all his life less than a day’s good going from London.  But it’s Gruffydd who knows the city.  His debonair cosmopolitanism is, Tom reflects, somewhere on the uncertain margin between comical, irritating and arousing, with the balance finally falling to the last.  The balance pretty much does always fall to the last; he would otherwise hardly be here, in a rather self-consciously renovated Eastcheap hostelry’s second-best bed, with Gruffydd’s left leg wedging his sticky thighs apart, his head on his shoulder, his fingers tracing a delicate path from Tom’s navel to the base of his cock and back.  Tom can feel himself beginning to get hard again, although it’s not been long enough and it makes his balls ache. 

 ‘Would you like to take a bath, Thomas?’

‘A _bath_?’

‘Mmm. Southwark is just across the river.’

‘The _stews?’_

_‘_ The stews, indeed, look you. There are actually some very respectable houses over there—where they chuck you out if you try to do anything more than bathe—’

‘Well, I suppose, if—’

 ‘—but don’t worry, I won’t bring you to one of _those_.  Tom, _cariad_ , your _face_.’  

Tom is still sometimes startled by the breadth—and, it must be owned—the _depth_ of Gruffydd’s experience. He doesn’t know if it’s a gentry thing or a Welsh thing, but he can touch pitch and come up smelling of roses. Some of Gruffydd’s off-duty resorts—places Tom would never on his own account go within three siegeladders’ length of—would come as quite the shock to men who only know the punctiliously correct captain in the field. He havers.

‘I don’t think I really need—’

 ‘Of course you don’t need. If you want to be _clean,_ I can direct you to that very commodious washstand or the marshalsea butts.  I’m talking about a _bath_. You’ll like it, I promise.’

 Gruffydd is a man who delivers on his promises, so Tom finds himself awkward and stiffnecked in the stern of a Thames skiff while Gruffydd natters trivially to the boatman. By the time they reach the south bank of the river they have disagreed and reconciled on the Lollard question, exchanged genealogies to the fourth generation and Tom has said nothing except _good day_ , _yes_ , and _thank you_.

 The bathhouse Gruffydd takes him to is respectable, or high-class, at least: expensive to the point of luxury, _all_ blades checked at the door, _no_ exceptions, fastidious in enforcing sex-segregation for patrons. The last, Tom correctly deduces, is trade protectionism rather than moral rectitude, but he can’t imagine what must go on over on the women’s side.  As they are taking off hats and gowns, a tiny, plump woman wearing a brocade houppelande and a jaunty, mannish cap hurries out of a side-chamber with a volley of what Tom dimly recognises as Flanders Dutch, and somewhat to his surprise (though by now nothing about Gruffydd should surprise him) he replies, a little haltingly and with a pronounced Welsh intonation, in the same tongue.

She says something teasingly reproving, at which Gruffydd swings her off her feet and nuzzles a kiss into her high collar.She squeals a universal _put me down_ and he sets her gravely aright, making a low courtesy over her hand.Were he not using all his considerable forbearance not to cough or shuffle his feet, Tom could kick himself for feeling as he does.

 She appraises Tom lightly over Gruffydd’s bent head, and raising him as carelessly as a queen might, asks a question. 

‘Daresay.’ Gruffydd says in English. ‘Would you mind being presented to the quondam mistress of the Bishop of Winchester, Tom?’ 

‘When Adam delved and Eve span, former mistresses of the bastard sons of John of Gaunt were fit company for any man.Captain Thomas Gower, madam, at your service.’ His bow is more military salute than civilian courtesy.Gruffydd turns a scandalised expression on him. Tom shrugs. 

She laughs.‘Gruffydd, your _face_.You hold onto this one: he’s a proper bit of all right. _Not_ like some of the others, don’t you gainsay me, you know it’s true.And you just call me Tante Lise, Captain Gower.’Her accent is a throaty mixture of Southwark and foreign.Tom shifts his weight.

She flags down a passing servingwoman. ‘Annick, these gentlemen will require wine, comfits and a perfect minimum of personal attendance, which is not to say you can scant on their hot water either.’

Annick bobs and leads them to a pleasantly-appointed tiring room, where two other men are wordlessly dressing. She murmurs to another attendant in Flemish, and the other woman goes to a linen press that occupies the length of one wall to fetch head- and body-cloths.Gruffydd drops to his knees.

‘What are you _doing_ , Griff?’ 

‘Giving you a hand with those boots, m’lord _._ ’Gruffydd winks.

Tom steps back and perches on the joint-stool behind him. ‘Cheers, they are rather ti—’

He freezes.They have, of course, undressed—before—with—one another—last summer, before they confessed themselves, they bathed in rivers and millponds and Tom watched Gruffydd, who cannot swim, gravely observing him, who can. But after they _had_ , they were mostly obliged to content one another half-dressed; if they commandeered a house or stayed at an inn they could share a bed though there was never space enough to take a room alone together. Every man in their two companies probably knew what went on, but propriety demanded they do it after dark and beneath blankets. There had been the last week of Gruffydd’s stay in Kent—when they had undressed one another, urgently, fumbling as they kissed, and residing in London for these last few days before muster, they could be almost casual about it—but what Gruffydd was doing now was none of that. He had spoken loudly enough that the servant and the other bathers must have heard, and Tom realises that he doesn’t know the way out of this one, if there is a way out. He addressed Gruffydd by his given name: the irony of the response would be lost on anyone who did not catch the wink. Tom sees himself as the others must: a tall young—youngish man in bright, fashionable new dyes. Gruffydd, who cannot be persuaded to care about clothes beyond keeping them mended, which he cares about very much—a perfect monster of darning; men laugh until they find themselves tattered and ragged on reconnaissance without a camp-following seamstress for miles—is wearing tidy subfusc grey, earth green and ochre.It feels more entirely shy-making than anything that has ever happened to him, and he serves in an army which takes its cue on matters of joyless practical joking from its commander-in-chief.Gruffydd sets the boots behind him and makes a minute _stand up_ gesture; he undoes Tom’s belt, winds it into a coil and places it with the boots, then sweeps the short skirt of his doublet aside with one hand and starts on his points with the other.

 ‘You _can’t do this._ Not _here_ —in front of—' Annick collects his clothes as Gruffydd discards them; her gaze has precisely the veteran, middle-distance quality that Tom associates with interminable anecdotage about brass cock-ups at the relief of Brest and the phrase _they don't like it up 'em, sir_. He looks away quickly.  'I should you, at very least.’ he whispers.

Gruffydd looks up. His fingers don’t stop or slip.  ‘Not so _loud_ , look you,’ he murmurs, ‘and _you_ probably couldn’t.  It’s harder—more difficult—than it looks. Takes practice to do it without prodding a fellow.’  

And indeed, he has barely touched him.  He moves around to Tom’s back points, which is scarcely less maddening.  Practice, of course, Gruffydd has.  As page and squire, he must have spent his youth doing more servile and demeaning tasks than Tom has ever had to turn a hand to.  This, Tom realises, is a display of dominance as much as an act of homage.  He should probably feel affronted, but affront—especially on his own behalf—doesn’t come easily to him.  It has always seemed too absurd an emotion, even when there _isn’t_ a gentle-born Welshman’s nose half an inch from his arse-crack.

‘Maybe I want to be prodded.’ 

‘ _Shhh_. Of course you do. Soon.’ 

He releases the last knot and begins to fold down Tom’s hose, never even grazing skin. How must it have been for a man of Gruffydd’s make to have rendered bodyservice? Tom imagines himself as a youth, having to perform such acts for—someone he found comely (even someone he _didn’t_ )—and since he can neither imagine finding attractive a man who is not Gruffydd nor project Gruffydd, who is the epitome of his here-and-now, into his Gruffyddless past, he rather absurdly pictures a woman. He shakes his head in wonderment.Not all of the many laws and disciplines by which Gruffydd lives come from the military primers of Rome.

Gruffydd tuts at him unfastening his own doublet, but admits the independent action, and slides the garment from his shoulders. The hands that have so often slipped under Tom’s shirt to caress, scratch, pinch and tease, now unlace and lift it impersonally.Tom, mortified because his thin, scanty braies accentuate more than they conceal, and excited for more or less the same reason, accepts and wraps himself in the vasty clout Gruffydd takes from the maidservant who is not Annick and hands to him with (at last) a most unsquirely grin, appreciative to the point of wolfishness.Emboldened, Tom frankly watches Gruffydd strip.  He hasn’t gained back enough of the weight he has lost this last horrendous, bloody, shit-shotten year. Tom has, and a bit, but he reckons he looks well when he’s a touch portly—and he’ll need that bit when the supply lines stretch, then fracture. Fasting is the only religious expression that Gruffydd pursues beyond strict convention, but he does it with a keenness Tom finds faintly unseemly—and wounding, when he suspects that one of their mutually pleasurable diversions has occasioned an episode of stirabout. Tom confesses his sins too, of course, but in accordance with the costive principles of disclosure that successfully govern his professional life. 

There are slack folds at Gruffydd’s waist, the compact bulk of his chest and haunches seems, just minutely, withered somehow. His right foot is disfigured by a large, glossy bunion. His legs are short, but beautifully turned.  As Gruffydd bends, Tom has a vivid impulse to shove his cock between his thighs, to feel bunched muscles twitching beneath skin waxy, livid and taut with scars. It’s not how they do things: he has until now been more than content to let his phlegmatic nature receive and absorb Gruffydd’s vigorous one; to satisfy Gruffydd’s aggressive desire in the containing of it is his pride as well as his joy. He thinks Gruffydd would _let_ him reverse the parts they take, but he wants much more than mere acquiescence, he realises, he wants _surrender_ , which is probably why he’s never tried it.  

Gruffydd knots his hair on top of his head and wraps it in a cloth; when he raises his arms his ribs are enumerable beneath the frail curtain of lax flesh. Tom decides he doesn’t give a toss: he’s seen no body he ever wanted more.  Uncomfortably, he thinks of the body that has suffered four childbeds for him, but that, he thinks, is different.Desiring Nan as much and as immediately would be a bit like desiring himself, because they are, after all, one body, and that would surely be wrong, though there was a time he had—aware that he has reached the outer bound of both of his sacramental theology and his patience with his own thoughts, he resolves to enjoy himself now and repent at leisure.

The bathhouse proper, in the undercroft, is clamorous with distorted voices, dense with steam and shadowy, servile figures emerging from it, but sweet-smelling and so deliciously warm it makes your eyes prickle; it’s like hell with the harm taken out.  Tom wants to say so; he thinks it would be a singular sort of thing to say, the sort of thing that makes Gruffydd turn fond tryacle-pool eyes on him and murmur, _oh, Tom, del bach._

‘ _Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate_ , look you.’

Tom slaps Gruffydd’s shoulder.‘Show-off.Latin?’

‘Her natural daughter; but a very well-got poem for all that. The _Comedy_ of Dante.’

Tom nods.‘The fellow who saw hell.’

‘And heaven, with purgatory height in between them,’Gruffydd adds in his aggravating dame-school tone.‘That’s why it’s a comedy, all’s well that ends well. But that bit is about hell’s lintel. I don’t actually know any more than that of it.I tried to learn when I was in Tuscany, years ago —Thomas!  not to be _staring,_ see.’

‘Sorry. There’s sort of nowhere _to_ look,’Tom mutters.And indeed there is not: stalls edging the undercroft each hold their own tub and bathers, wavering, bulbous-headed figures half-lost in steam and shadow.Down the middle of the room runs a row of troughs, set side to side and overtopped with a low trestle laden with delicacies; couples sit knee-to-knee in them, tasting kickshaws and wine.All the women and some of the men look quizzical, tolerant, deliberate —the _staff_. Tom wonders if Gruffydd has on occasion bought the services of those young men, who regard their interlocutors with vague smiles, stirring the water with distracted hands; he finds he knows the answer, and that there is, after all, somewhere else to look.

The maid who is not Annick shows them into a one of the recesses. She need not say—it’s obvious—that it’s the best spot in the house: close, but not too close to the great ranged fireplaces that heat the water, sequestered from the sightlines of almost every point in the room.The tub is round, in diameter nearly as wide as Tom is tall, with thigh-high sides, lined and draped with fine linen; it must be, he thinks, usually intended for the accommodation of more than two.A daybed, also curtained, is pushed against the back of the niche, and between it and the bath is a clothes-horse laden with towels. Two small tables, one bearing small flasks and dishes of herbs and powders, and a bell to summon the attendant, the other a larger flask, cups and a tray of sweetmeats, stand within arm’s reach of the bathtub.It is probably important not to confuse the contents of the tables.He realises he is dithering; Gruffydd has divested himself of his body-cloth and is leaning out of the tub, murmuring to the maid, Tom catches _wild lettuce, look you_ , and she giggles and bobs.

‘Get in, Thomas _bach_.The water’s blissful.’  

It is.Tom suffers as tall, heavily-built men often do with his joints, and he has spent as many nights sleeping on the ground as ever he has in a bed.The bath smells of rosemary, tarragon, mint, basil, and something faintly marine, like samphire. He sinks into the hot water, groaning and gasping with pleasure.A bathtub in which he can extend his legs is an entire novelty to him.

‘Here —’ Gruffydd thrusts a sodden, faintly bristly mass into his arms.Tom blinks queryingly. ‘It’s a sponge. You sit on it.’He does so. 

‘God’s bones,’ he remarked, gawping up at the tent of delicately striped linen ‘—this is all rather _luxurious_ , isn’t it? Is it—’

‘On the house—oh, you mean your soul.It is very excellent that you are concerned for your soul, Tom, because as you know I worry that you may be seduced by plausible heresy, you know no more of the sacred truths of Holy Church than does a puppydog, look you, but it is as St Augustine once said, _not yet_.Have some wine.And comfits, there are comfits, very pretty comfits.’

Gruffydd settles himself between Tom’s spread legs and rests his head on his chest. 

‘The cheek of you. _Me_ in danger of heresy, you dirty bugger?’ he says comfortably and affectionately, twining his fingers in the black, wiry mat of hair on Gruffydd’s chest and fidgeting at his nipples.‘What did you mean—on the house?’

‘Lise had some landlord trouble.And I—organised a small company to help her.’

‘ _Landlord_ trouble?This is the liberties of Southwark, isn’t it?’

‘Your sense of direction is admirable.The Wissant incident has become nearly legendary, you know—’

‘Oh, shut up. Those sand-dunes were very deceptive.But her landlord—is—’

‘Henry Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester. There are rumours about a Cardinal’s hat.’

‘I’d soon as give him an old nun’s twat.But hang on, I thought you said she was—’

‘Erstwhile.The lease was a benefit of, ah, severance.And, you know, for a prelate it is often well for his right hand not to be knowing what his left hand is immersed up to the oxter in.’

‘But what about the pristine disciplines of the wars?I mean—’

‘Whatever do you mean? The defence of womanhood is among the higher practices of chivalry, see—’

‘ _Chaste_ womanhood—’

‘I think that’s putting indelicate conditions upon the matter, look you.’

Tom clears his throat. ‘So, you wouldn’t—know, then? As it were, personally?’

‘She has a daughter by him—oh.’ Gruffydd wriggles around to look him in the face. ‘Captain Gower, are you jealous?’

‘God’s teeth, that _would_ be ridiculous.And unfair, considering.’

‘I’m not asking if it’s fair.I’m asking if you’re jealous.’

‘No!’ Tom bellows; his voice resounds in the confined space and he moderates it.‘Stop trying to change the subject.I mean, do you know what you’re messing about with? Assaulting the Lord Chancellor’s men on behalf of a bawd doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me.’

‘It wasn’t, as it happens,’ says Gruffydd almost dreamily. ‘I had to make myself quite scarce for a while; ended up in Scotland out of that. Very valorous people, the Scots.’ He bends his knee and indicates the vestige of a an eight-inch falchion bite on his outer thigh—lucky in its way, any deeper, and at best he probably should have limped for life.But Gruffydd ever did move too fast for bad luck to catch up with him in battle.‘Which is why you shouldn’t be jealous.’

‘I’m not _jealous_ ,’ he says obstinately.

‘Good.’ Gruffydd takes the untouched cup of wine from his hand, puts it back on the table and gives him a deep, liquorice-savouring kiss.His hands slip beneath the water and work slowly, provokingly—water this warm, Tom realises, breathing hard, has fewer anaphrodisiac qualities than the millponds and rainbutts he is used to.‘I am, you know.’

‘What?’

‘Not when Mistress Gower takes you to bed.Envious, maybe.’

Tom casts back his head and closes his eyes.Though the sun shining through the high windows is watery, it’s enough to pierce his eyelids, make him see a pale red-gold mist.He thinks of Nan with child to Gruffydd.He would kill him, though unless he could contrive to do it with an arrow fired from seventy yards away, he’d die trying. He wouldn’t _want_ to use a bow.He thinks of Nan with child and not knowing which of them—that inflames something perverse—something he _wants_ —in addition to anger. He chokes out, ‘I—she—you—I. She likes you.’

‘I know that.I’m not envious of you, though. Of her.’

It takes Tom about half a paternoster’s pass to work it out.He reserves the dismissive, complacent _I know that_ like a packet of stockfish, to be chewed over in privation and misery. ‘Christ’s bollocks, Gruffydd.Are you saying you want me to—you—’

‘Certainly, if you should like it. _Sed noli modo_ , though, the girl’s just coming with more hot water.’ 

So they wallow a little longer, growing sweaty, scarlet-faced, giddy with wine and honey on empty bellies.But when the water has cooled, Tom declines to ring for more hot.The awning is about six inches too low for him to stand up straight; rather a pity, since, made reckless by drink and the libertine character of the establishment, he is in the mood to show off.He perches on the rim of the bathtub, in the opening of the canopy, parts his legs and spits on his right hand.

‘Tom, _del bach_ , the oil of the sweet almond, look you.’

He feels himself blushing for his gaucherie; but obstinacy overtakes it, and he shakes his head.  

Gruffydd’s face is complicated: he’s never quite said as much, but Tom knows that his life before was divided between the lords and knights to whom he swore (usually hopeless) lovelorn fealty and the goat-herds and apprentice boys he swived for two groats and two pints of _vin de pays_.When they first met, Gruffydd was dogging John Holland’s heels like a second shadow, drawn by the sulphurous spoor of his father’s attainder as much as the youth’s piercing good looks and battlefield prowess.Holland had never addressed so much as a glance in his direction.Gruffydd’s perplexing conversational approaches had led Tom initially to assume himself insultingly categorised in the rough plonk and eightpence class, and he’d administered a couple of fairly stiff knock-backs before he copped to the truth of the matter, and indeed, to his own feelings. He has seen, too, how Gruffydd behaves in the presence of the king, and how the king repays abject personal devotion allied to crack soldiery and lunatic physical courage.It would be one thing if Gruffydd were too dense to form an assessment of the king’s character—his character as a man: cold, capricious and cruel—and saw only the alchemical, sun-reflecting crown, that burnishes those base attributes to yellow gold.But Gruffydd’s no dolt, he knows the king for what he is, and he still prostrates himself before him.Perhaps that is why men should only love women, Tom thinks uncomfortably: the other is too dangerous.

Exasperation rises in him: he loves men, or a man at least, and he presents no danger to anyone not swinging at him with sword or poleaxe, but a gentleman born he cannot be, and if Agincourt didn’t bring him a coat of arms, probably nothing will now.But he’s no apprentice pig-keeper either: his yearly rents could buy out two of Gruffydd and have enough left over for a ruined Percy.He’s growing tired of his yeomanly speech and yeomanly manners being matter for faint reproach, yet his yeomanly prick and yeomanly thighs being somewhat too polite to thrill.  

‘If you’d have such a one oiled to the hilt, look out there among your super-serviceable finical rogues.Take me, take a soldier, take a soldier, take a man of Kent.’He spits again and strokes his nodding, half-hard cock to full twitch.

If Gruffydd can mock him by playing at page, he will serve him in rough kind, and see how he likes it.

He likes it, it seems, very well, because he kneels up, leans across the bath, puts his hands on Tom’s thighs, and his lips to the head of his cock. It should be a very excellent remedy for thought, but lately it has brought to mind what he privately refers to as _the leek thing_ ; more when he gives than when he receives the pleasure, but nonetheless—Gruffydd was astonished to find that Tom was hurt by _the leek thing_ , for he had meant it as a skit on his own pricksmanship. _Sodding_ gentry; always so concerned to be seen sportingly making a joke against themselves, never considering that others might see it as personal reflection— _that_ particular flutter and whirl of the tongue, however, makes resentment very hard, very hard indeed, only one thing harder, and Tom relents into delectation, unwrapping Gruffydd’s headcloth so he can bury his fingers in his black, springing, coarse hair as he thrusts into his mouth.

He’s reached one of those points when he has to start adding imaginary columns of figures to hold himself back—Gruffydd in the same state, he knows, because this they have vouchsafed to one another under the conditions best suited of all to unreserve, silently recites a grimly beautiful poem about a catastrophic defeat in the north country eight hundred years ago, which of all the absurd Welsh things Gruffydd does must surely be the Welshest and absurdest—when Gruffydd removes himself and looks up.

‘Don’t—stop—’

‘Patience.’He trails the back of his hand over Tom’s hipbone and along the crease between thigh and groin, ending by cupping his balls. ‘Yes, I’ll take a man of Kent, _cariad_.But I think I promised a man of Kent he might take me.’

‘You really meant that? Like—’

‘I think the penitentials usually say something like _vitium detestabile modo muliebri._ ’

‘What does that mean?’

Gruffydd coughs. ‘After the fashion of a woman, see.’

‘Oh. Do they mean, um —’ he makes a gesture intended to be indicative without grossness, ‘or just—’

‘Nobody knows.I don’t think they know themselves.’He smiles; there is mischief in his dark brown eyes, but also a pliant trustfulness that Tom has not seen before. ‘I’m willing either way.But, Tom—’

‘Mmm?’

‘The oil of the sweet almond is very virtuous, look you.’

They prove the virtue of sweet almond oil to mutual satisfaction, and sprawl, sweating and exhausted, at opposite ends of the daybed. Gruffydd rings for the servant to fill the bath again. 

Tom relives drowsily the joys of possession: Gruffydd yielding to him with a panted _Jesu—Jesu—Jesu_ —that gave onto profane commentary (Gruffydd’s English having been learnt in the obscene schools of war, he has a vivid if somewhat repetitive lexicon for such occasions, and he thinks the young, base-born language admirably fitted to them) then inarticulate noise as Tom found, rather fortuitously, an angle and a rhythm that rendered restraint as impossible as it was undesired; Gruffydd whimpering as he spent helplessly over Tom’s hand.Tom’s memory of his own bodily ecstasy is already slipping away—snatched, he supposes, by the fiend who tempted him first to this sin, but for the moment he can’t be persuaded to give a shit.

‘—in dedication to Hygeia solely, who is painted with a pannikin of milk and a snake, which signifies to you, which is the moral of it, that she is cleansing, and wholesome, and nutrition, and also—Tom, are you listening to me?’

‘No, not really.I’m thinking about you, though.God’s bones, Griff. The penitentials are _fucking_ wrong. Not mondo mules—whatever it was you said.’

‘Really, Captain Gower.They’re compiled by very learned men.But they probably are fucking wrong. Which you, by the way, despite some trivial maladroitness, are not.’

‘Glad to hear it—does that mean you’d like me to do it again some time?’

‘I would like it certainly. Not so _loud_.’

When Gruffydd is scrubbing his back, back-scrubbing being an activity conducive to confidences, Tom asks,

‘About—jealousy.’

‘Mm?’

‘I wasn’t quite telling the truth.’

‘I know.’

‘What do you mean, you know?’

‘I know jealousy is jealousy.’

‘But when you said you were—what did you mean, if not—’

‘You _Saeson_ speak a very broken form of your mother tongue.You are all over hesitations, and gaps, and stutterings.But as to my sin, it is in contravention direct of the ninth commandment.’

Tom enumerates thoughtfully.‘Oh. But I thought you said you didn’t—me, not her—or was it the other way around?’

‘Oh, Tom.The ninth commandment isn’t just wives and handmaidens, look you.It is houses and asses and oxen and _omnia quae illius sunt_.’

‘But you needn’t, you know. It’s all as much —as much yours as it is mine.’

Gruffydd scoops water and trickles it down Tom’s back in a sort of _nunc dimittis_.‘Thank you, sweeting.’  

Despite the endearment, the simple kindliness of his thanks, Tom knows they both feel the emptiness of the offer.Fortune is ever turning in her inconstancy, and perhaps it will happen that he will lose everything he has.But that uncertainty is more certain good than the iron certainty of Gruffydd’s future: the lands of his ancestors are part of an English lord’s estate; he likes women too well to marry one to whom he cannot honestly pledge his body; he will never father son or daughter, though he has a gift to make children adore him on sight; he will serve out his health if he is lucky, or his life, if he is not (though perhaps that is the other way about) in the army of a nation that loves his country as a tyrannical husband loves his wife—not to part with as much as a village of her, and to suppress everything that makes her herself in the assertion of his sovereignty.  

It is well for the nobility, but men of the middling sort must make themselves households, for they will not make household words. When Gruffydd’s carcase is laid in earth—in churchyard or churned field—the long thread of ap this and ap that and ap the other, from which he takes his head and honour, will be cut and ravelled up in a little, little grave.The steam and that salty sea-herb—perhaps it is powdered bladderwrack—make Tom’s eyes leak.He squeezes them tight shut.

Gruffydd climbs out of the bath.‘One thing for sure. We are _not_ dining at the Boar’s Head this afternoon, or ever in our lives again.The kitchen is very scurvy and horrid, and they water the ale with horse-piss, I cannot account for it else.I will take you to Mistress Rykener’s shop, at the sign of the Tabard, yes.You’ll like Eleanor, Tom; she tells a very good tale of herself—’ 

Tom opens his eyes just in time to catch the towel Gruffydd throws him.  

‘I’m game. We’ll pay God in deaths soon enough, Captain Llewelyn, and the king too, but it strikes me that for the time being we owe ourselves a riotous good drunk.'

 

**Author's Note:**

> I've written a couple of other stories about [polyamorous negotiation in the Gower household](http://archiveofourown.org/tags/Gower%20\(Henry%20V\)*s*Original%20Female%20Character\(s\)/works). More detail about Fluellen's [Tuscan adventures](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1719062).


End file.
